Sloowww, slow, slow in Site Updates (Josh)

Hey everyone,

tl;dr:
Yes, I know, and I’m just as frustrated about it as you are. We’re working on it.

The long version:
I know many of you have noticed the frequent server slowness lately. Believe me, so have I. I’ve been digging into server logs and monitoring site activity, and what I’ve found is.. odd.

Here’s a screenshot of CPU usage on the database server lately:

Right around the 30-minute mark of every hour, there’s a spike in processing and memory usage. Whatever is causing these spikes also causes slowness across all parts of the site – page load times, auto-save issues, even the occasional panda. And then, right after the spike drops, it’s fine again for the next little bit. The obvious answer would seem to be that there’s some sort of timed batch process or service running, but I’ve been troubleshooting all of those and as best I can tell it’s nothing obvious.

Our developer is looking into it as well, and after spending a weekend digging, we’re looking into upgrading the server and database driver to see if that’ll fix the issue. That said, upgrading can come with potential issues of its own if not done carefully, so we’ll be taking some time to make sure it’s done correctly. Thankfully, we have a staging server we can test on before we make any big changes on the primary site.

What all this boils down to is: it’s going to take a bit more time to get things back to a good place, but we’re working on it.

And now, Mochi:

<3,
-J

Last updated September 29, 2022